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Tuesday, April 25, 2017

As the Tweet above suggests, yesterday (April 24 here, April 23 in the USA) was the tenth anniversary of me joining Twitter. The fact that I forgot all about it probably says all I need to about how diminished its role has become for me. Even so, it’s nevertheless a real-time history of how my use of social media has changed.

Twitter was the second social network I joined, after MySpace (I joined Facebook a few months after Twitter). My original plan was to use those social networks to promote my podcast. I did that for awhile, but Twitter was one of the first that I started using for other things—or, to put it another way, it was the probably the first that I stopped using to promote my podcast (although in those days I hardly used Facebook for anything). I set up a separate Twitter account for my AmeriNZ Podcast in December of 2009, and one for 2Political Podcast in July of 2010. [Links in the original]

In the years since, I added an AmeriNZ Facebook Page to promote the stuff I do, but I still don’t use my personal Facebook to promote anything, and seldom use Twitter either. On the other hand, I rarely podcast these days, and haven’t blogged much this year, either, so it’s not like anyone would even notice that I used social media to promote something. Instead, I use the Facebook page to share stuff I won’t share on my personal Facebook, mainly stuff about US politics.

There’s no particular reason why I reduced my use of social media, Twitter in particular—I just have. Maybe I got tired of it, or of the constant waves of negativity that seem flow through it too frequently. Sometimes I got sick of shallow thinking or self-righteousness, but that was rare. Mainly, I think I just moved on.

I don’t know how I’ll use social media in the short term, much less the long term, or even if it will exist months or years from now in anything like the form it does now. But the truth is, I really don’t care. I use social media when I feel like it, I often get interesting information from it, and I often have fun. Right now, that’s enough.